A perfect match
Development’s Bryant gives her husband
the ultimate gift — a kidney

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

When Robin Bryant’s husband, Ricky, settled into a dentist’s chair for a root canal two years ago, life was good: He was running a successful transportation business; Robin was happy at her job of 10 years as division coordinator in Rice’s Office of Development; they had been married 12 years and had a beautiful 11-year-old daughter, Rikki. Little did Ricky imagine that this routine dental procedure would change their lives.

As the technicians prepped Ricky for the root canal, they took his blood pressure, and the reading was through the roof: 200/100. They immediately sent him to the ER, where he got a bombshell: His kidneys were failing.

“The doctor said, ‘Mr. Bryant, I’ve got bad news. You do have high blood pressure, but it’s too late, your kidneys are already gone,'” Ricky said.

	TOMMY LAVERGNE
	Robin Bryant, right, donated one of her kidneys to save her husband Ricky’s life.

Ricky and Robin were in shock. They had no idea he was even ill. He felt fine. Like most people whose kidneys fail due to high blood pressure, he had no symptoms. His doctors told him that he had two treatment options: dialysis, where a machine acts as an artificial kidney, or a kidney transplant.

Robin immediately felt a transplant was the best choice, and she was ready to be tested to see if she could donate one of her kidneys to her 33-year-old husband. Ricky, however, wasn’t so resolute. He planned on just living with dialysis — until he learned what a tough row it is to hoe.

“It’s rough,” Ricky said. “Dialysis made me feel terrible.”

Typically, the lifesaving treatment is done three times a week at a dialysis clinic. Two pencil-lead-sized needles are inserted into the patient, connecting him to the dialysis machine, which removes waste and extra fluid from the blood. The process lasts three or four hours and leaves many patients feeling nauseated and lethargic, in addition to making them prone to anemia, low blood pressure, bloating and blood clots, among other things.

The day of dialysis and the day after would make Ricky groggy, he said, and just when he’d get back to feeling well, it was time for another treatment.

“It changes your life,” Robin said. “We used to travel and have good times but once he started dialysis, everything changed. Our lives just stopped.”

After a few months, Ricky was ready to consider a kidney transplant.

Because blood relatives are normally the best bet for a match, Ricky’s mom was tested, but her blood type wasn’t compatible with that of her only child. Robin was ready to step up to the plate, but Ricky balked, overwhelmed by concern over her and their daughter. His next option was to put his name on a waiting list for a deceased-donor kidney, but that could prove to be a wait of many years.

In the United States, more than 80,000 people are on the waiting list for a kidney, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which coordinates the nation’s organ transplant system. Additionally, transplantation requires an alignment of circumstances and factors beyond need and availability and includes tissue match, blood type, immune status, the distance between the potential recipient and the donor, and the recipient being healthy enough to undergo major surgery.

Robin, however, wasn’t waiting. She got herself tested, and against all odds, they were a perfect match.

“People tell us all the time that was a gift from God,” she said.

After several months of tests checking them top to bottom, inside and out, the Bryants were cleared for surgery. On the morning of May 8, the couple underwent a five-hour surgery at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital. Doctors removed Robin’s healthy kidney through a tiny incision in her belly and placed it into Ricky. It began working immediately.

Ricky felt great. “We stayed in the hospital for five days, and I wanted to get out of there after the second day because I felt so good,” he said. But Robin felt like she was hit by a bus.

“It was like having a cesarean section,” she said. “If they had gone through my back it would have been worse. But would I do it again? Yes.”

The couple continued their recovery at home, in quarantine, where Ricky’s mother provided care for them. As the weeks passed, the discomfort diminished, their healing progressed and eventually they resumed their normal lives.

Throughout the entire ordeal, Ricky had kept his illness pretty quiet. His barber and even his best friends didn’t know what he was going through. A few weeks after the surgery, Ricky stopped by the barbershop for a haircut. He was wearing a surgical mask, a necessary precaution in the weeks immediately after the surgery to protect him from germs. His barber quizzed him — was he scared of the swine flu that was capturing headlines at the time? When Ricky told him what Robin had done for him, the barber was floored. It was a reaction that became familiar to them — one of astonishment, amazement, hugs and tears.

Ricky said in retrospect, divine intervention seemed to play a role in a lot of the process. He’s not a particularly spiritual man, he said, but he had to admit there might be something to that.

Today, the future is once again bright for the Bryants. They’re both passing all the postsurgical milestones with flying colors. Robin’s remaining kidney is expanding to function as well as if she still had two. Each time Ricky goes to his doctor for a follow-up visit, his lab work is better and the number of medications he takes every day — more than 30 pills before the surgery — is smaller.

“The transplant just changed our lives,” Robin said.

They’re planning a family vacation like they enjoyed taking before Ricky’s health crisis — a trip to the Bahamas or perhaps Tahiti. Somewhere they can show off their matching scars.